The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2025
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I’ve heard this many times before and it rings true each time.
The odd thing is that when you get a little more money and you start spending the 50 dollars on the nice boots, you learn that there's an assumption about quality built into the price. Sometimes the 50 dollar boots are 20 dollar boots with a fancy brand name. Or they used to be high quality, but the brand got bought out by venture capital and manufacturing moved to another country and the quality of the materials used in the process changed.
Yep, and in the same way the inverse can 'sometimes' be true too.
A "nice" $80 headset will outlive the cheap $20 one. And in a lot of cases it'll also outlive that cutting edge $500 one that has features you dont need.
So do your research, the inconvenience means it's probably more worth it to figure out WHY a product is good and then shop for the things you learned instead of just letting amazons top 10 recommended headsets guide you.
Being more informed about the things you spend your life-spent-turned-to-cash dollars on is always a good idea. Helps prevent buying slop too.
But the $500 headset was endorsed by that famous person with that hit song from 20 years ago, so surely it's been vetted for the highest quality manufacturing standards!
I've read this before, but I am currently working my way through the Discworld books in order and I'm on this book. I read this part last night and it's a little surreal to encounter it in the wild today.
I am still running an Ideapad from 2017. In its entire life I've never been able to get an external HDMI monitor working on it, but could at least attach a DVI monitor. The "updated" video drivers make the whole unit horribly unstable and it will hard freeze randomly, so I downgrade back to the original shipping drivers from 2017. However, this means I can't control some of the video card settings and I think I may be missing some brightness in the LCD because of it.
Some years ago even the DVI adapters stopped working. About 7 years ago I dropped it and bent the metal frame of the laptop, but didn't affect function. I replaced the battery this year when its original one was only holding a charge for about 40 minutes total. Its back up to a 3 hour charge now using a questionable no-name battery because Lenovo doesn't even sell first party batteries for it anymore. Recently the touchpad has stopped working, but will start working again with a full power down then power back up. I'm still deciding if I want to spend the $30 on a replacement part from ebay or just put that $30 toward a new unit.
On one hand I should be happy I'm still using it as my daily driver for a personal laptop after 8 years, but on the other, it was flawed from day 1 and is slowly getting worse.